Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
I don't know. I (finally) hooked up to coverage last night on a streaming site, and saw some shots - quite a lot of shots, actually - of some very violent action on the protesters' behalf. I saw people running past other poeple waiting in a line and smacking them and yelling things at them. I saw tons of people fighting cops. I saw a parade float burning. Overall, my impression was that there was a very significant amount of violent demonstration going on. But, even watching a work TV today, with just network channels, this is being downplayed.
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If it weren't your ox being gored, you'd see how utterly circular your argument is. The NYT says the demonstrations have "largely proceeded without violence," and you point to some occassions of violence to show that's a falsehood and proof of an agenda? What is the NYT to do if what you viewed is not, in fact, numerically representative of the protests in general, and that hundreds of thousands of the protesters hadn't raised a hand against another?* You would prefer that NYT readers see evidence of violence and come to a conclusion based on that alone? News doesn't exist in a vacuum. People who are there have to report the news to people who aren't there.
News without context is simply data. Journalism involves employing context to give perspective. When we lack that perspective, we aren't getting the news. So you don't see that as Orwellian, let me give an example: I know firsthand that people on the East Coast thought the entire city of San Francisco was engulfed in flame on October 17, 1989 because the news helicopters kept rotating between the Bay Bridge, that one house in the Marina, and the Cypress Freeway. Not being able to recognize these landmarks as they kept appearing on screen, non-San Franciscans were convinced the entire city was devastated. Locals knew better, because they recognized they were seeing different angles of the same thing. If CBS Evening News had told Easterners "The city is remarkably free of chaos and destruction following so large a temblor" would that have been misleading, even though it's mathematically true? If you think they should have said "Only .34% of the city is actively burning," go establish your own network and good luck with that.
At the end of the day, this whole fight is about the fact that our metro papers are more reputable, popular, and profitable than your papers --- so much so that you doubt their competitors' existence. I'm telling you that millions of people in red states read red papers, but they're provincial and shitty** and don't have national readership. Draw your own conclusions. Try to do so without invoking vast left-wing conspiracies, because you've still come up with no coherent reason why the successful mainstream media allegedly displays such "obvious" bias, yet succeeds in a nation in which you claim the center.
*What, Bilmore, what? Sorry, had to be said.
**This is both gratuitous and true. In recompense, the SF Chronicle is provincial and shitty and liberal.
